IOTA wallets – security issues that lead to loss of funds

The IOTA Foundation has advised users to close their Trinity wallets after multiple reports of money theft.

IOTA said it started receiving reports as early as Wednesday and decided to close the Network Coordinator node for further investigations.

“Most evidence is directed at seed sentence theft, the cause is still unknown and under investigation,”

said the foundation.

“The victims (about 10 who have been identified so far) seem to have used the Trinity wallet recently.”

It is estimated that between $ 300,000 and $ 1.2 million was stolen in IOTA tokens, according to Dominik Schiener, co-founder of IOTA Foundation.

Trinity is a wallet developed by the foundation available for mobile, Windows and MacOS. To date, no mobile user has been affected. There is only one Mac user that was affected, and the rest of the victims were Windows Trinity users.

The Foundation evaluates an exploitation on an earlier version of its wallet. It also tries to analyze the hackers attack model and complete a manual check.

On Twitter, IOTA said it is working with law enforcement and cyber security experts to investigate the possibility of a coordinated attack.

This is not the first time that IOTA wallets have security issues

IOTA wallets have had security vulnerabilities in the past. The first implementations of the IOTA wallet were reported as unstable and resulted in the loss or sending of tokens to incorrect addresses.

In another incident, a team of MIT researchers criticized a network hash function, but the IOTA team denied the vulnerabilities found on social networks.

IOTA corrected the cryptographic vulnerability shortly, but was commented by independent cryptographic researchers. IOTA insisted that MIT misrepresented the risks as well as their conclusions.

Last January, a British hacker stole over $ 11 million in IOTA tokens and was caught by law enforcement. The IOTA Foundation has managed to recover almost all the stolen funds, but its reputation has suffered.